Category Archives: Art, Theatre, & Film

Determined

I am listless. Lethargic. Languid. Langorous. Languishing. Limp, even.

I have absolutely no energy whatsoever. The most action I have participated in over the last twenty-four hours was waking up much too quickly at 2.30 this morning to bounce out of bed and partially close windows. Some storm! Then, of course, I went back to bed with a headache because of the plummeting air pressure and the waking-up-too-quickly-ness.

I broke three glasses yesterday because someone who shall remain nameless insists on piling all the used dishes into the sink. He claims he can’t stand them being on the counter. My point of view is that the counter is smaller than the sink, so the dishes would get washed faster if they’re on the counter. In addition, piling them into the sink means that as they don’t get washed as often, they take up more room, and I can’t use the faucet to get water in the kettle. Finally, he has a bad habit of just piling, not thinking it through, which means that heavy plates and pots get put on top of glasses and delicate mugs, resulting in breakage of said mugs and glasses when attempts to shift the pots and plates out of the way are made in preparation for washing.

So I was irritated about the glasses. We now have two glasses from that set left. That’s it.

On top of that, I woke up in a crafty mood and pulled out a sewing kit I’d had in my possession for over ten years. Yes, indeed; with all my back problems I’ve been toying with the idea of finally constructing the corset I fell in love with lo these many years ago. Unlike others, I actually have enjoyed my previous experiences wearing a corset; I’ve done it a couple of times now for two runs of stage work, and they’re darned comfortable, let me tell you. So I ordered a reconstructed pattern and supplies from an American dry goods company and then left it, not having time or the sewing skill at that point to accomplish what the pattern asked. After ten years, I’ve acquired a sewing machine and made my share of insanely complicated Renaissance outfits, including a couple of boned bodices, so when I looked at the corset pattern yesterday, hurrah! It made sense! In fact, it was easy! I could put it together in a single day!

Yeah, well, the best-laid plans, etcetera, etcetera.

Having such long legs and a short waist, I have to adjust every pattern I use to shorten the torso, otherwise the waist ends up around my hips. I shortened the corset pattern and then on a hunch, I decided to check to see if the boning and the front busk closing would still fit.

My hunch was correct. The busk was now an inch and a half too long.

Busks are made of metal, like the boning. You can’t just trim it. So I folded the project up and seethed for a bit about the unfairness of the one-size-fits-all mentality. I wasted time on the Internet. I finished my reread of Howards End. I decided to watch the movie while the book was fresh in my mind.

The VCR didn’t work.

By now I understood that the day was in fact out to get me. Fine, said I; I’ll read, then. Upon which I remembered that I had just finished my current fiction and had to find another novel to read. I hate choosing what book to read next. Being between books is dreadful.

Then, of course, I broke the glasses before I even started washing dishes.

The day did get better. I watched Howards End over dinner with my husband once he’d reset the VCR. He had never seen it before and was surprised to discover an energetic examination of what constitutes richness, intellectual riches or material possession. I was delighted to re-discover how true the movie is to the book. I also decided to re-fit the pattern and allow for nice big seam allowances on the top and bottom, which I rarely do (why trim the seams when you can sew tiny ones to begin with?), resulting in the front busk just barely fitting. However, alas, there was no way to rescue the glasses.

Today looks like it will be another horribly listless day. At least I can finish the corset. I started another book, Still She Haunts Me, about Charles Dodgson (whose nom-de-plume was Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell (immortalised in Alice in Wonderland), but it’s rather banal, so I think I’ll switch to The Winter King which Tas has lent to me.

Know what else is frustrating? I can’t string my own bow. I manage to flex it to about an inch short of where I’d need it to be to slip the looped bowstring over the tip, and then I’m stuck.

Maybe I’ll go see what’s happening in the Great Canadian Novel, which acquired four and a half more pages on Saturday after all that procrastination, thank you very much.

Thoughts

If I were a mage, there are two things I’d invent immediately.

One: Self-cleaning dishes. Coming home after a week’s vacation to a sink of dirty dishes is bad. I don’t not enjoy washing dishes, I dislike having to wash them.

Two: Self-cleaning clothes. Doing laundry is expensive and time-consuming. Worse, though, is the Eternal Laundry Basket Curse all my clothes seem to be laden with: Where’s my brown shirt? Where are my jeans? Wait, I know – the laundry basket, because when I finally washed them, I didn’t have the energy to put them away in drawers where they’re supposed to go. At least they’re folded.

I found a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary in a second-hand bookshop yesterday, started reading it on the way home, and finished it yesterday mid-afternoon. Brilliant. Now I have to see the movie, because in the book Bridget suggests doing a TV journalism piece on the off-screen romance between Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, the stars of the BBC Pride & Predjudice, and of course, Colin Firth is in the movie version of BJD, playing another Mr. Darcy. Look! Inter-media reference! I love it!

And for those who have not heard the news, we have the new car; the albatross is no longer in our possession!

Surprise Novel Attack

I’m not quite sure what I expected, but my triumphant return to creative writing wasn’t supposed to creep up on me like this.

Out of the blue yesterday afternoon, the words “What makes a great Canadian novel?” floated through my mind, and all of a sudden I was scrambling for my laptop. Four hours later, I had eight pages of something new on my screen. I don’t know what it is yet – a long short story, a novella, the seeds of something larger; I was too amazed to think that far ahead.

I used to write constantly. I’d hear a bit of dialogue, or get a flash of a visual, and away I’d go. I would have to explain the context to myself, come up with where it had come from, where it was going. I loved to write. I wrote on buses, in the back of history classes, in the backyard, in the middle of the night when I woke up.

I lost it, though, about eight years ago. I might connect it to several things: an increase in theatre, the end of my BA and the beginning of my MA, more hours at work, taking up the cello. The end result, though, was less and less words on paper that had nothign to do with Browning, Dickens, or Byatt. My creativity was being funneled into a variety of different places instead. I tried to force myself back into it about five years ago, but it was difficult, and I’m not sure when I stopped.

All I know is, I miss it. I miss having that bubbling idea surfacing and demanding a context. I miss the excitement of discovering characters, finding out what happens next in their lives.

Ceri and I made a deal: a certain amount of pages and hours spent writing per week, to be reported at a weekly coffee date. Perhaps years of MA-ing have convinced me that I’m not a creative writer any longer, for I look at half-finished stories left languishing for half a decade and I can see that they’re good, but I can’t finish them. Instead, I produce non-fiction, which is solid, but doesn’t nourish the soul in the same fashion.

Now, however, I remember. I remember the glee with which I reach for paper and pen. Part of me watches in astonishment as the words roll onto the screen. It’s the permission I give myself to drop what I’m doing and leap for the notebook, assuring the little creative spark left in my brain that it can come up with ideas, it’s more than welcome to, and look how important I think it is, I’m ceasing all activity and paying attention to it, the dear thing, because what it has to say to me is important.

I can’t stop thinking about my characters. Everything I see, everything I think, becomes a part of their world too. How would they act in this situation? What would they say? How would it resonate with their particular pasts, and their psyches?

I’m excited again, which is thrilling in and of itself. I’m excited about the feeling, the product, the rediscovered ability, the passion.

I think I’ll buy a new pen today.

In Which She Muses About Ballet

Wandering through one of my favourite second-hand bookstores here in Oakville, I found a copy of Karen Kain’s Movement Never Lies: An Autobiography for only twenty dollars. Needless to say, although I walked away from it virtuously, I stopped by again later in the afternoon to take it home with me. Karen Kain was a goddess to me when I was a child. I’d borrowed this autobiography from a friend of my mother’s when it was released a few years ago, but when I saw it on the shelf, I knew I had to own my own copy.

I danced for seven years as a child. I wasn’t obsessed with the ballerina stereotype, the way some girls are; it might have had something to do with how much I disliked the colour pink. No, what I loved was the physical expression of dance. I could use my body, my awkward clay, my shy hands, to tell a story. I forgot that I was shy when I danced. I could be graceful, and un-self-conscious, and light.

It didn’t hurt that I was naturally very flexible. Exercises that others had to fight to achieve were second-nature for me. Music, too, was a part of me without effort; others had to struggle to internalise music in order to fuel the dancing, but music has always been a language I have been able to hear and understand without difficulty. I was not, as you might guess, a favourite of my dancemates, just as I wasn’t popular among children in regular classes – too quick, too smart, too easy.

My mother took me to see a ballet at Place Des Arts as often as she could, usually once a season. I have had the excellent fortune to have seen the Kirov ballet do Cinderella; I saw the National Ballet of Canada do their celebrated Giselle and Romeo and Juliet, among several other ballets. We saw a lot of theatre, too. My mother has always been very determined that I would be exposed to the same kinds of culture that she had been exposed to as a child. Her father would always take the children to see the new Rogers and Hammerstein musical as it came through town, and one of my mother�s fondest memories was going into the city to see Romeo and Juliet with her older sister. She passed that appreciation of art on to me, and I expanded into opera as well, which I adore.

I began dancing at six. After a year, the National Ballet School recruiters were coming through town, and my teacher requested that I be allowed to audition. At the time I didn’t understand what an acceptance into the National Ballet training program would entail. Yes, I would be able to train to be a dancer; no, I truly had no concept of the discipline, the homesickness, the pain, the chances of failure, the depression. My mother, knowing perfectly well the horrors that children go through at ballet school, refused to allow the audition. I was disappointed, of course, but at seven, these losses come and go, and are easily forgotten.

I danced until I was just about thirteen. At thirteen, we were considered old enough and formed to a level where we could begin pointe work. This is what every woman who has ever imagined herself in place of a ballet dancer moving gracefully across the stage dreams of: the elegant long line of leg and arm, the ethereal illusion of floating, of weightlessness created by balancing on her toes. A woman en pointe possesses an ultimate secret femininity. Part of me yearned for that; part of me yearned for the slow, controlled moves that pointe work requires. Another part of me eagerly anticipated harder work: exercises, developing a new centre of gravity, working different muscles. Going en pointe was a rite of passage from child to adult.

I would have kept on dancing but for the fact that my teacher sat me down and explained that although the next step was to move on to dancing en pointe, there would not be enough students to fill the class. I and my sole remaining classmate would have to be put back a year, repeat what we had just learned, and then go en pointe two years from now with a full group.

I was crushed, and affronted, and insulted. Repeat a year when I had been so successful? Be held back to dance with people a year younger? Did she not understand what going en pointe meant to me? Had I not paid my dues, put in seven years of work to reach this moment?

Being a few weeks shy of thirteen, however, and still shy, I felt my eyes sting with tears and said little. And I just didn’t go back in the fall.

I regret it immensely now, and I have for about a decade. At thirty-one, you can see that a year – a single year of evening classes once or twice a week – forty-odd hours of extra work is nothing. At thirteen, though, it’s a lifetime.

I tried to go back when I was twenty-three. I called a dance school and they invited me to an evening class to try it out before I registered. I was terrified, but I went. The teacher was wonderful, and had I tried a class early in the session I might have registered with them and still be dancing today. The class I audited, however, was near the end of the term, and the dozen women in the group all knew the sequences the teacher was calling out. I tripped; I stumbled. I couldn’t recognise what the teacher was calling for next. I got in people’s ways. At the end of the class I avoided the women as they cooled down, skulked into the changing room to pick up my bag, pulled my coat on over my dance clothes without changing, and slipped out, my eyes burning again with tears.

And again, I never went back.

So re-reading Movement Never Lies makes me think about a lot of things. I wonder what might have happened if that audition had gone through. I look at Karen Kain’s life and although at times it was glamorous, like any kind of theatre, the effortless and natural illusion presented to the audience covers a community clinging to sanity by the skin of its teeth, performing despite sprains, back spasms, bitter and violent fights with a co-star, touring conditions that would horrify rats, and the artificial society that never quite fits into the real world. I deeply admire any man or woman who has the physical strength and mental and emotional endurance to commit to a life of dance. Had I kept on dancing, my knee and back problems might never have existed � or I might have been crippled by them. The Might-Have-Been game shoes no horses (to mix metaphors); I do my best not to play it. Dance formed my body and my love of theatre, and for that, I’m thankful.

Seven years of dance when you’re in such a formative stage leaves its mark; it is a part of me now that I could not shed if I so desired. I am complimented on my movements, both on-stage and off. I am usually quite aware of my body and how it is reaching, stretching. It is now natural for me to stand just so, legs turned out, usually with one foot slightly in front, heel of one nestles into the arch of the other. Arm movements always lead with the hand, thumb underneath the palm. My pelvis is tucked underneath my torso � and if I catch myself not doing it, I correct myself without thinking. I rarely stand face on to anyone or anything; three-quarter front was drilled into me as being more aesthetically pleasing. If I’m sitting, I sit on an angle, or at the very least turn my head slightly. And when a man I dated for a time welcomed me into his circle of friends, the sign of acceptance was being given a mock Native American name.

He named me Walks With Grace.

Ephemera

Time to lighten up a bit. I can’t be an angst-ridden intellectual 24/7, after all.

I promised myself I would stop wasting space on these, but I found this and I just had to share it in light of how amusing my life can be:

Disney Princesses
Which of the Disney Princesses are you?

Apparently, You are a true bookworm and dream of a life better than the simple, quiet one you lead now. Your good looks can attract the town jerks, but you manage to ignore them most of the time. Sometimes you feel like you’re surrounded by idiots. So what are you waiting for? You don’t need your father to be kidnapped to get out and see the world. Although you can be stubborn, you’re also very compassionate and see beyond people’s fa�ades.

And I thought this would lighten things up? “Sometimes you feel like you’re surrounded by idiots” is just a colloquial way of paraphrasing my last two days’ worth of blogging on the devaluing of the intellectual in today’s society. My life, I tell you, is a comedy.

Also amusing: in flipping through the other princess descriptions, I found this in Esmeralda’s paragraph: Luckily you don’t die at the end of the Disney movie, although in the book you’re hanged.

Losing Literacy

My poor book club witnessed a wide range of my emotions last night, from despair through righteous fury in our discussion of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 last night. We talked for quite a while about a society that is losing its ability to read (one theory that arose was connected to scientific tests being done which are suggesting that the physical act of reading text is an increasing effort for the evolving human brain, as opposed to pictograms or other forms of communication, which was quite interesting). Naturally, that led to talking about the educational system repeatedly dropping its standards. Education is expensive; failing a student means you have to pay for a year of that student’s education twice; and heaven forbid we discourage their efforts by negative reinforcement. No, no, we must empower them instead by passing them despite their lack of skills necessary to acquiring the next set of skills, which in turn undermines the next level, and so forth. Why is it a crime to do this with faulty screws on an assembly line of, say, airplane engines, but not with the human mind in an educational system?

Today I discovered an article in the Times Online (that’s the UK times, not the NY Times) that addresses the same problem. The author of the piece had agreed to teach a journalism course, and began by asking the students which news programmes they watched. They couldn’t answer. Nor could they name newspapers that they read regularly. These were journalism students, who should be studying the medium to which they aspire. Or, if not studying, then at least aware of, exposed to. One assumes that they must have heard about journalism somewhere!

Was it not reasonable to expect undergraduates who had signed up for a three-year media degree (encompassing subjects ranging from print journalism and website design to video production and broadcast news) to have more than a passing interest in the news agenda?

Apparently, yes.

�Many of the students I teach have basic language and writing problems which have not been addressed at school or by the university,� says a lecturer in broadcast journalism at another university.

Foreign students paying to attend media courses are being misled by universities, says the departmental head, who is obliged to take a significant percentage of them each year. �In my view, universities that take students who don�t speak English to a good standard are taking money under false pretences,� he says.

Foreign students? At least they have the excuse of a language barrier. How about the local students who can’t write an essay, because they’ve never been taught how, in all their years of schooling?

An interesting point came up in the discussion last night. Once education became compulsory, it began communicating ideas and analytical methods to more people than ever before. Suddenly there were more educated people, bending class boundaries, flooding professional career positions. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, educational standards have been lowered alarmingly, perhaps in response to that flood of educated persons. Is society top-heavy with thinkers, who can so easily become agitators? The paranoid side of me which reads too much science fiction and dystopic novels wonders if the lowest common denominator has become the measuring stick for us all in order to keep better control over society. The point was made last night that time and again in various societies, the intelligensia has become the ruling class, and anyone of promise is usually plucked out of the masses to either be locked away, terminated, or to become part of the system of government. Which means, as soon as a government educates its citizens, they are in immediate danger. (And you may choose who I mean by �they� � the government, or the people it has educated. Or both.)

Bleak.

It returns to the question which crops up every once in a while: what purpose do artists serve? The philosophers, the writers, the painters – what function do they serve in society? Granted, yes, entertainment is one of their functions, but by no means their primary one. Artists are the conscience of a culture; they question, they compare, they cast issues in a different light, they challenge and they overturn… so long as they are free to do so.

Creative writers enjoyed great prestige in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union because of literature’s unique role as a sounding board for deeper political and social issues. Vladimir Lenin believed that literature and art could be exploited for ideological and political as well as educational purposes. As a result, the party rapidly established control over print and electronic media, book publishing and distribution, bookstores and libraries, and it created or abolished newspapers and periodicals at will. – from the Library of Congress’ Russian Archives: Attacks on Intelligensia: Censorship

With the intelligensia on your side, your regime will be quickly accepted. Having artists on staff (or the patrons who fund that art on your side) to uphold the current status quo is a clever move. It leaves the artist open to accusations of not producing “real” art, however – art produced freely and without allegiance. Defining that state is problematic, as artists throughout the ages are usually at the mercy of some sort of patron, or at least those clients for whom s/he produces work. Ideally, however, freed of the capitalist imperative (ha ha ha), an artist has the right � perhaps even the duty � to respond to the ideas of the day, to discuss, to question, and to push the envelope ever further. Building a better mousetrap may have gotten us to where we are today technologically, but it has been the philosophers who have made us, morally and ethically, the thinking and feeling human beings we are presently. (Interestingly enough, they used to be one and the same. Leonardo da Vinci, anyone?)

So where are today’s artists? The one who are to serve as our moral compasses? Probably at the bottom of a slush pile in a publisher’s office. Turned away from a film production company because their idea “just wouldn’t sell”. Check out this rant on the current state of art prostituting for the state entitled No Baudelaires in Babylon: Tom Bradley’s Comments at the Paris Sorbonne International Conference on Electronic Literature. Wicked and grating and not for the faint of heart.

Perhaps my frustration stems from the apparent devaluing of the intellectual aspect of our culture in favour of speed and efficiency. There must be some way the two can co-exist instead of one triumphing at the expense of the other. Maybe I�m too idealistic (as I was accused of being by one of my thesis examiners), but I believe that the solution lies in an equal attention to mind, body and soul. Capitalism doesn�t have to exist in an intellectual and aesthetic vacuum. I freely admit that new methods of communication and entertainment can have value; I just don�t think they should be replacing the older methods. Such a replacement limits access to the valuable older works (be they film, text, or musical), thereby cutting off generations from their heritage. Everyone should have access to the works of the world, modern and ancient, whether they want it or not. The option should exist.

See what happens? Give me free time and I get restless and start rabble-rousing, exhorting people to think. Next thing you know, I�ll vanish � for my own good, of course, and to keep the rest of you nice and safe�

Musical Voyeurism

And here I thought my migraines and backaches would be history once I stopped working. Apparently I live a rich fantasy life.

I’m lying in my bedroom working on my laptop. Usually I have music on, but right now there’s a saxophonist wandering through some pieces nearby. This is the sax player who completely enthralled me by playing “My Favourite Things” for twenty minutes last summer, arresting my motion as I swung into the bedroom with the intent to quickly grab a book.

There’s something particularly special about overhearing someone playing an instrument. Making music is such an intimate practice that listening in is a bit voyeuristic, in a way. Music has a different life if you’re aware that you have an audience; it becomes performance rather than an act of love, and while performance can be done lovingly it inevitably acquires a different dimension. Some might argue that it’s a necessary dimension – the old tree falling in a forest paradox. While performance adds spice to music, much the way an audience adds an essential element to a piece of theatre, I think that an audience of one – namely, the musician – can serve a more immediate purpose. The act of making music entails pulling emotion out of one’s soul and interpreting it through an instrument. That act of interpretation fulfils a desire within the musician whether anyone else is there or not – possibly in a purer fashion if they are alone, since there is no need to groom that emotion to present it to someone else. It’s music for the love of it, proven so by the fact that no audience is required.

Writing can be like that too. I know plenty of people who write to satisfy something inside them who, once a body of work is accomplished, quietly tuck it away somewhere. They feel no need to share the product; it was the act of putting thought to paper that satisfied some urge. I know others, of course, who seek to communicate to/with others via written word, and who have published, or who at the very least pass the writing on to someone else. The point is, the act can be done for the sake of the act itself.

I envy my saxophonist neighbour. Not just his (her?) talent and his technique, but his/her comfort in practicing with open windows. I cringe at the thought of anyone hearing me practice, to such an extent that my husband created a miniature practice room for me in our huge front hall closet in our last apartment. It was just big enough for me to sit in and have full bow arm extension in both directions, soundproofed with styrofoam and carpeting and yet I still was convinced that people could hear me. This terror of being overheard originates partially from my innate shyness, and partially from my first two years as a cellist in an apartment over a crusty elderly woman who complained if my cats ran up and down the hall.You can imagine her reaction when I practiced scales, or when a friend came over with her violin to play duets. Loud banging on my floor shattered whatever shreds of self-confidence I was struggling to establish, at a time when I was trying to figure out who I was, how to express myself as an individual, how to deal with being an adult learner with all the inhibitions that implies, and how to survive with my parents newly removed from the province. Reactions formed so early on have persisted throughout my eight years of cello-playing, which is one of the reasons why I love listening to this saxophone. Someone somewhere not only is comfortable enough to play without caring who hears, or who might complain, even if the same music is played for twenty minutes. The knowledge that someone that close to me (geographically, if not personally) is inspiring.

So, too, is my astonishing ability to play as much Bach as I have discovered I am capable of playing. A year ago, I was crushed at how poorly I played pieces I performed with capable technique when I was still studying with a teacher. Ten months of struggling in orchestra has restored much of the technique I’d thought lost. Which, of course, is one of the reasons I joined. That… and the ability to practice with less self-consciousness, as does that saxophone player nearby who will likely never know how happy s/he makes me, or what a wonderful example s/he sets me.